IATI Consultations Archive

Add @activity-id attribute to participating-org element

To enable publishers to express connections between activities, the addition of an activity-id attribute to the participating-org element may be useful.

Currently, publishers can say:

[participating-org role="Funding" ref="GB-1"]

... to state that DfID (GB-1) are a Funding partner in the activity

The addition of an activity-id attribute would enable linkage to specific IATI activities within this element:

[participating-org role="Funding" ref="GB-1" activity-id"GB-1-12345"]

.....to state that DfID (GB-1) are a Funding partner in this activity, via activity GB-1-12345

This could help both publishers and users to establish and explore linkages between activities. It would be expected that transactions would then describe the specific flows of money - but this link could be made from the outset/initially - and may also be a useful focal point for data users.

It could be argued that related-activity could be used for this - although this lacks the @role and @ref attributes for the organisation. Additionally, the current codes for RelatedActivity don't seem to express this (particularly 5): http://iatistandard.org/201/codelists/RelatedActivityType/

In I agree with the need to be able to model this kind of relations. Should not there be an IATI guideline though how to use the standard to model these relations between activities? When to use the 'related activity', the 'participating organisation' and the tranaction providers and recipients? How to use the different kind of relations in which use cases? How to avoid double counting? In the current standard there are many possibilities how to model these relations. Without guidelines everybody will invent the wheel for themselves: every publisher speaks its own IATI dialect. Adding more possibilities to link up activities without clear guidelines, mightbe detrimental to the usability of the data.

I think this is an excellent idea SO LONG AS it is not seen as an alternative for basic traceability rules.

This will add richness to related data on participating organisations. The key to traceability however must, wherever possible, be built around transactions reporting incoming funds and provider-activity-id.

Hello Steven, thank you for raising this. As it stands, we are planning to keep the ‘activity-id’ name, as this will be consistent with the <provider-activity-id>, and they both have very similar functions (i.e. referring to an activity’s id, rather than declaring it).

You’re right, however, that this inconsistency shouldn’t be there in the first place. Given that it is, and that non-backwards-compatible changes require more consultation (plus and must take place within as part of an integer upgrade), we think it’s best to just make to two referential instances compatible for now.

This proposal has now been incorporated into a version 2.02 code repositories (see the above GitHub issue link for technical details). The relevant page on a development version of the 2.02 reference and documentation site is available to view here.

We welcome scrutiny on the implementation of this proposal and encourage the community to feedback and suggest solutions for any errors, omissions and problems. This should be done before Monday 7 December, when the process will commence to release version 2.02 as a live version of the IATI Standard. More information on the inspection phase is available here.